Free SimCity? Free Civilization?

The best SimCity knock-off is LinCity-NG. It has a tendency to crash in Linux, but it runs fairly smooth in WinXP. It's free and open source. The project is abandoned, though.

I'm not sure if C-evo is open source, but it's the best freeware alternative to Civilization for Windows. It's free, it looks great, and it has a map editor! It even has an extremely low filesize of 2.4mb! What more do you need?

I'm keeping a look out for better sandbox games. There's a decent Portal clone in development, but it doesn't seem to be worth posting about yet. I'll keep you in the loop.

Toribash: Bubble Madness

The first fighting game I've posted about is "Toribash: Violence Perfected." The tagline makes it obvious that kids should not play it. On the other hand, I know a lot of 12-year-old girls who play Mortal Kombat and DoA. I also know a lot of 8-year-old boys who love playing Halo, but I won't get into that....

I strongly suggest you try Toribash. The characters are basically glorified stick figures, but the game has a sandbox mode, in which you can simply play around with the bodies and even make your own martial arts flick. The actual fighting seems to be more strategic than most button-mashing competitors. I have not tried the game out, but I'm downloading it, and I recommend you do the same.

DIY: Make DirectX Games

As I browse the loads of games Ubuntu offers free of charge (too many NetHack clones), I may as well show you a game construction suite specifically for Windows users. It's called Construct, and it's extremely easy to use.

In Construct, you have templates for pre-constructed games, and you have a blank template. There's also an option to make applications, but that feature isn't working yet, so let's make a game...

Choose the blank game template.
Right-click on the canvas and add an object.
Choose the Sprite object, which is just an image.
Draw a quick doodle or load your own image.
Close out of the sprite editor and save.
Click on the sprite and look at his properties.
Add a behavior. In my case, I added the 8-Direction movement.
Finally, save and test the game. Your doodle should move.

To truly learn to use Construct, you should follow the instructions on the Scirra tutorial for making a top-down shooter. I made my own modifications to the template and basically made my own game out of it. You can download my game here.

I also started working on a more ambitious project in Construct. That project is called SyMe'z, and it will be one of those games you could play for a very long time and never run out of stuff to do. Like Animal Crossing, sort of.

Linux Games: Eve Online

I have not tried this MMOG, but I certainly plan to! You can get it at its official site for most Linux OSs and Windows XP. I hope it's a good game. I plan to try it out this weekend. Also, if you want to try the Ubuntu Linux operating system, you can get it here: http://www.ubuntu.com

Just a small note, Ubuntu is entirely free and costs you nothing.
Why are you still using Windows?

My Collection of Linux Games

I'll just separate them into their genres for easy access...

First-Person Shooter
Sauerbraten - Cube dazzled me with its level editing prowless, so I played Sauerbraten, essentially Cube 2, and I was amazed. Furthermore, this is the must-have game for level editing, but its online play is severely hindered by hackers and know-it-all newb haters.

Tremulus - This is one of those proof-of-concept games. They thought to combine two totally different gameplay aspects into one game. The two genres this can fall under are FPS and RTS. This game is a bit like Team Fortress in the sense that you can choose a character class, and it has a familiar building feature to build turrets and similar objects. I really like this game. Click here to learn more about it.

Warsow - I just like the graphical style of this game. The actual gameplay isn't impressive, but it is still entertaining if you like first-person shooting. My advice is to find something else, though. Also, the only way to get the Linux version of the game is to get the full package, which includes the Windows binary.

Platformer (you know, the jump-and-collect stuff)
N - This was made in Flash, but there's a Linux binary available for those who're still anti-Flash. It's one of the best platform-jumping games I know of, and I hope you enjoy it. This game has a level editor.

Rhythm (like Guitar Hero)
Frets On Fire - I shouldn't be the voice for the rhythm genre, because I'm not a big fan of that stuff, but I loved PaRappa the Rapper and its sequels, and Frets is not like PaRappa the Rapper.

Strategy (anything that requires thinking)
FreeCol - The screenshot in this blog post is of this game. FreeCol is a pretty neat game of colonization. Your mission is to colonize territories. This game is far from done at a development standpoint, but there's enough to keep you busy for a while.

Gate88 - This is one weird game. By weird, I just mean unorthadox, and, by unorthadox, I mean weird. Anyway, I like this game, and I think you will, too. It has a blend of action-packed and strategic gameplay, and it looks good to boot.

Glest - This is my favorite strategic battle game. I don't play it often, though, because I can't save my progress and feel the satisfaction of leveling up like in Diablo or some other dungeon-crawling game.

UFO:AI - The AI is for Alien Invasion; not Artificial Intelligence. However, it's a futuristic strategy game that doesn't give you the build-to-do gameplay mechanic. Instead, you just send in troops to kill aliens.

Wesnoth - Rather "the Battle for Wesnoth," as the site says, this is one of the games I ended up playing on Windows first. I like it, but it's not quite as addictive as Glest.

Graphic Novels (not-so-interactive stories)
Narcissu - This game is like reading doujinshi (Japanese comics) but requires electricity. The payoff is that it's free. There's a sequel as well, so try Narcissu 2 if you like number 1.

Obviously, you can play Flash-powered games in Linux, too, so I suggest a game called N.

Graal is back again!?

For those of you who never became associated with the awesomeness that was Graal Online, it was a late '90s MMORPG, in which you and the other players controlled the game content. In essence, it was Second Life but two-dimensional. Those interested in making world were able; those only wanting to play were given all the opportunities to do so.

The community was stabbed in the back when the game became pay-to-play. Over time, those still devoted to the game kept it alive in the form of private servers, and I know of only one place left to relive the glory days, and that's here: http://www.graal2001.org

Perfect World

A few posts ago, I mentioned a free MMORPG called Perfect World. I said I'd give you more information after I played the game for a while, and I played it, so here's my opinion of the Perfect World:

OMG! This game rocks! O_O Seriously, I love it. It's like playing Oblivion online with the wing mod. I was attracted to the game by a video of people playing in the air, but I expected to have to level up a lot to fly. That's not the case.

Over time, as you level up, you gain more flying energy, which allows you to fly faster and for more time. I've noticed the speed of flight is considerably slower than running, but it all depends on your agility level.

Also, some buffs can speed you up or give you extremely fast health regeneration. This is when character classes come into play. Priests are the only class with spells to buff other players, and they can cast some pretty helpful buffs to enhance your combat ability. Therefore, if you party with one, he/she could stand away from the battle and just rapidly heal you or make you stronger, and the experience would be divided between you.

Of course, I'm not a priest; I'm an archer. I can spoot magically enhanced arrows from long distances to damage enemies before they can damage me. This is very helpful at later levels, because the enemies can hurt you when you're flying, however, if you're new, you're never hurt very badly, unless you attack something at a higher level than you.

This game is more than combat, though, and you will notice right off the bat that you'll have opportunities to race against a clock to fly somewhere or even mine iron ore... though I haven't found any iron yet. (I'm looking!) To mine ore, you need a shovel, and I believe you can use the same shovel to dig up plants, but I'm not sure.

Overall, I love this game, and I can only hope the developers add microphone support. If you're looking for a fast-paced MMORPG to play whenever you like (for free), Perfect World is for you.

Arcade Style Games You Must Play!

Grid Wars isn't the only free game to challenge the ranks of Geometry Wars games. A small company titled Binary Zoo has released a demo of a pretty impressive game titled Mono. They have other games, though, and the games are all free.

Geometry Wars clone or greatest freeware ever?

I bought Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved for my PC. Since I loved it so much, I went searching for Geometry Wars clones and found a freeware game I thought was much better than Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. The game I speak of is Grid Wars 2.

Surprisingly, Grid Wars also has the same initials as Geometry Wars, so I can't just use short terms for the games or we'll all get confused. Anyway, Grid Wars 2 is only 3MB, so pretty much anyone can download it. If you don't have internet access at home, you can easily fit this game on your measly 32MB flash drive.

About the only thing I get from Geometry Wars that I don't get from Grid Wars is music, but that means I can play my own music with WinAmp!

Grid Wars official site (as far as I know): http://gridwars.marune.de
Programmer's other work: http://www.incitti.com/Blitz
Awesome Grid Wars 2 review with download: http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/grid/wars.htm
Direct link to download: http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/grid/GridWars54.zip

Syboard Ghostbuster

I'm moving away from Flash when making games from now on. I'm now using two programming suites, Construct and DarkGDK. I'm also looking into XNA and whatever else I can find for 3D game development, but for now, I'm using Construct for 2D games and experimenting with DarkGDK for 3D purposes.

Anyway, I've made my first game in Construct, but I used a tutorial, so it's far from original. Check out Ghostbuster. I'll update it over time to include a few extra features, including the most requested high scores table. You may request something in the topic by clicking here.